


All The Pieces

by in_a_different_box_to_you



Series: Harry Potter and the Broken Mirror [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Back to Hogwarts, Friendship, Hogwarts Eighth Year, M/M, POV Draco Malfoy, Post-Second War with Voldemort, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-19
Updated: 2016-12-05
Packaged: 2018-04-10 03:54:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 9,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4376225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/in_a_different_box_to_you/pseuds/in_a_different_box_to_you
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'He is not schizophrenic; he is a war criminal.'</p><p>The war is over, but some dead have yet to be buried and Voldemort has left his mark on the living. Draco Malfoy returns to complete his final year at Hogwarts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters

_Six thirty._

 

He always sets his alarm at exactly the same time. It gives him a time to focus on as he lies in the dark, in that haunted time before dawn, when monsters are real.

 

Except, as he’s startled awake, drenched in sweat, he remembers that, even in the cold light of day, the monsters are real. 

 

And he’s one of them. 

 

 

Sometimes he thinks that it must all have been a rather horrific dream. He feels relief flood him in a muggle shopping centre, because it’s better to be mad than evil. Better to just be a person, who talked to shadows for half his childhood and believed in magic, than one of the monsters who are real. These moments are like a high. They last for a few minutes, an hour - until he catches sight of an oddly dressed tramp on a street corner, shiftily hiding a wooden stick in his robes, or a politician slipping out of the frame of a photograph in a newspaper, shoved into an overflowing bin. It could be a hallucination, and, every time, Draco Malfoy embraces this explanation for a few beautiful, lurching seconds, before he catches several muggles staring with him. 

 

It always comes with shock, followed by horror, followed by resignation. He is not schizophrenic; he is a war criminal.

 

 

_Ten forty six._

 

The station in always a weird mix of magical families and slightly confused looking muggles on the first of September. Rather than being appalled by having to integrate with non-magical people, as he would have been a year ago, he gets a strange thrill from this clash of worlds. 

 

His mother wanted to be here, when he had sat next to her slight form - almost lost under the duvet - his knees brought up to his chest, his toes curling into the sheets to escape the chill, and told her he wanted to complete his education. When she had placed her head on his shoulder, he could feel the quiver of her pulse and was disgusted at himself when all he could feel was pity. 

 

There’s a moment when he wants to turn back, lose himself in muggle London. And then, as has been happening increasingly frequently since You Know Who’s death, Harry Potters voice hisses at him in the rustle of the crowd. _Coward._ He looks back towards the wall between Nine and Ten. _And use his name._ Draco misses being able to spit ‘Potter’ scathingly at a physical being, rather than at his subconscious. He slips through the barrier onto Platform Nine and Three Quarters for the final time. 

 

There are stares that turn into murmurs. Someone yells over the growing silence, _Death Eater._ Draco almost smiles, as he catches sight of Pansy Parkinson’s sneering face. 

 

The crowd parts for him as he clambers onto the train. He feels like a disease, or a dementor, as he drags his trunk down the corridor and, as he passes, students fall quiet and slip away into compartments. 

 

Thinking he better find somewhere to sit soon, he slides open one of the doors. A girl in a yellow dress, who must be a new first year, turns away from the window at the sound. Her older sister, who has an ugly scar across her cheek, steps between the girl and Draco, her face twisted into a defiant expression which, in the wizarding world, is gradually losing its effectiveness through overuse. He stands there for too long, then backs out again, mumbling, “Sorry.” _Sorry for what? ‘Sorry that you’re family has likely been ripped apart, that you’ve been scarred by Lord Voldemort and his mental followers - sorry I was one of them’?_

 

 

 

The next compartment is occupied by Hermione Granger, alone. Draco freezes in the doorway as their eyes meet. “Um.”

 

Granger just looks tired. For once, it’s Draco’s own voice that breaks through from the past, _You filthy mudblood._ She blinks. “I heard your Mother died.” It’s calculated to hurt. But it simply strengthens the numbness which protects his heart. She regrets it instantly, he can tell. He’s always been good at reading emotions. Often, what he’s seen makes him angry. Why should he live with other’s pain? Indifference came as the result of overexposure. 

 

Besides, his mother deserved to die. As does his father. As does Draco. 

 

He wants to say something. He’s a bloody Wizard, for Merlin’s sake, why can’t he say something to make it alright? “Bit ridiculous, isn’t it - that we can kill with a word, but no one’s made a spell to make everything alright?”

 

She just stares at him, so he pulls his trunk inside and lifts it onto the luggage rack. 

 

He sits opposite her beside the window and they watch the rain hammer the glass. A droplet streaks across his forehead in the reflection. He swallows. “How’s Potter?”

 

She doesn’t look at Draco, but follows the raindrop with a finger as it trickled behind the curtain. “He died, you know.” 

 

“No.” It feels wrong, to disagree, after everything. “My Mother, she lied to him. She told me. He was alive, because he nodded, when-“

 

“I know.” She interrupts, “But before that, maybe only for a moment, he died. He talked to-” Her eyes flicked towards him for a second, “He spoke to Albus Dumbledore.”

 

At His name, Draco presses the fingers of his right hand into his left forearm until it hurts. At the movement, Granger’s eyes are drawn to his sleeve. The both stare at it for a while, and he knows she’s remembering what it looks like underneath. She’s wrong, though. The Dark Mark is still there,only slightly faded since The Dark Lord’s defeat, yet it now lies on his mutilated skin, a mess of scar tissue from the time he tried to cut it away, and that other time, when he sawed through the bone in an attempt to amputate the limb. Eventually, he visited a muggle tattoo artist, trying to obscure it and almost breaking the Statute of Secrecy when the ink faded instantly around the mark. There is still a black mess around the edge, a couple of millimetres away from the original shape, which tangles with several recent cuts into his flesh, temporarily breaking up the mark. He knows that when they heal, it will be intact again, but for now it feels just a little bit like freedom. 

 

He feels dampness soak through his shirt, and watches the blood seep though his shirt and trickle from under the cuff and over his white skin. His mother had watched this once, as she sat, propped up at the dinner table like a child’s doll, taking tea from a china cup. And, like a doll, her eyes had fixed on it, as though made of glass, unmoving, until the blood dried, brown and cracked in the wrinkles of his skin, and he had picked up the fork once more and tried not to touch her as he brought a piece of potato to her lips. 

 

“Malfoy.”

 

He looks up at Granger’s voice, saying his name. He’s more surprised by the fact that he doesn’t care than the tear trickling down his cheek. Ridiculous really, that his head aches with tears when he is so empty inside. They say that Potter felt his scar prickle with You Know Who’s emotions. Is this what it felt like? This strange feeling that Draco is no longer a person, but a host for something bigger. It feels like a child, not the spoilt, unhappy brat that he was before, but someone who has always been there, waiting to take over, but who has not yet had a chance to grow up. 

 

“Malfoy.”

 

He feels lightheaded. There’s more blood this time, and the white of his skin stands out in a small triangle amidst the red of his hand. He doesn’t want to see Granger there anymore, so he brings his hands up to cover his face, thinking fleetingly that he mustn’t get blood in his hair. She grabs his arm, fumbles with his cuff and wrenches up the sleeve.

 

_Eleven seventeen_

 

_Eleven eighteen_

 

She pulls a small bag towards her, and he laughs, “What could you possibly do-” and he’s aware that he sounds hysterical, because he thought he’d be okay, with Potter’s voice to protect him, but he’s _really not_ , “-do to fix me?” And a deluded part of him hopes that she has something in her bag that will take away the mark for good, the same part that takes over in muggle shopping centres, telling him that magic cannot possibly be real, because it just doesn’t _make sense_. 

 

Granger doesn’t answer, but pours dittany onto the mess. They both watch The Dark Mark knit itself back together again. 

 

Because that’s all they really can do - try to put the pieces back in the right places, and hope that it won’t be as good as it was when it was new. 

 

 

He offers Granger the cleaner of the two hands and it hangs in the air for a moment. “Malfoy, Draco Malfoy,” he tells her, voice bubbling with mirth. “And do you really want to go making friends with the wrong sort?”

 

“I think I can tell who the wrong sort are for myself, thanks.” She takes the hand, her palm warm against his, and they shake.

 

 


	2. And I Love the Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Title: 'My Name is Mina', David Almond

_Seven forty six._

 

Everyone can see the thesrals now. He wonders what that means. Will it change them? This sudden mutation from being hidden away - part of another world, a world of grief - to being surrounded by others, thousands of newcomers to their broken plane?

 

The carriages clatter loudly over the cobbles in the dark. The swinging lantern lights Granger’s face with an orange glow. She smiles slightly as their eyes accidentally meet, before their gazes are cast once more into darkness. She smiles at him. Draco’s head begins to throb once more.

 

The gates slide open silently and, like a line of hearses, the convoy passes into the Hogwarts grounds. The lights of the castle glow in the distance, also shimmering on the lake below. 

As they approach, disappointment hits Draco suddenly, and stitches itself into his shroud. Hogwarts seems smaller, emptier, quieter, dimmer. It’s not the place that he’s boxed up and labelled ‘My Childhood - Part 2.’ It’s almost pitiful. Bitterness - he realises this is why the adults in his life have always seemed to regard him with bitterness. They had been cheated, all of them, never forgiving the world for the moment when the world turned grey, Christmas became just another day and Hogwarts became just another castle. When they grew out of Narnia. Do all parents resent their children, he wonders, or is it just those whose nostalgia will always be tainted by sin? They want to rage at Aslan, not realising that He was really just hope, and now He has gone. Because even in these muggle fantasies, the magic dies, so what hope does the reality of magic have against the Goliath-an presence of adulthood?

 

“Do you think anything will be the same?” Her voice is quiet, and he wonders whether, for her, the castle still is the place where she vanished from sight with her best friends, knitted clothes for house elves, saved a hippogriff, punched Draco Malfoy and fought You Know Who. “Draco?”

 

He’s startled slightly by his name, slipped from her lips, unaccompanied by his father’s for the first time. “No. We’re different now. We’ll see Him in everything.” He’s not sure if he means Voldemort, C.S.Lewis’ Aslan, or Harry Potter. 

 

He still has the scars. Sectumsempra never completely heals. Well, he’s realised, that’s not quite true - sectumsempra never fully heals on skin untarnished by the Dark Mark. He’s glad of these scars: He’s marked by both the Dark Lord and the Boy Who Lived. They have both fought across his skin, and he’s glad that Potter won in the war, even if he regularly loses the battle for Draco’s left arm. 

 

The students mass towards the doors to the entrance hall and, as everyone else looks forward, he tilts his head towards the sky. The wind cools his face as he searches the darkness for a sign that there is something up there. The stars reveal themselves one by one. Orion’s belt is followed by the hunter himself, then the North Star, from which he can pinpoint both the bears. He looks until his neck hurts, but the space where the constellation Draco should be is empty. 

 

The entrance hall has been reconstructed to resemble what it was before. It is almost impossible to see any change, apart, that is, from the alcove where the hourglasses once stood, which is now empty. The Hogwarts letter that summer had read, ‘Please be aware that the house system has been revised. House points have been suspended on a semi-permanent basis in order to reduce house rivalry. The Inter-house Quidditch Cup will still take place.’ Draco is, to his amazement, Quidditch captain. He can’t help but think that this decision will only strengthen the hatred between the other houses and Slytherin. 

 

Despite the fact that the eighth years will share a common room and dormitories, they still have to sit at the tables of their original houses. The great hall seems unusually subdued as the pupils already seated await the sorting. Hermione gives him a reassuring smile before they separate.

 

The Slytherin table is the emptiest. Draco and Pansy are the only two students in their year to return and many of those from the younger years have been sent elsewhere. Being placed in Slytherin is no longer an honour for the offspring of pureblood families, but something shameful and wrong. It seems that the governors are soon going to have to acknowledge that classifying eleven year olds and isolating them from those different to themselves has been part of the idiocy that created this mess in the first place. The psychological damage of being sent to the house which is arrogant, weird, useless or evil at the age of eleven has created a vicious circle, like a premature diagnosis of mental illness. 

 

Draco sits opposite and next to no one.He feels the burn of their gazes on his back. The ones he watched being tortured, imprisoned in _his house._

 

_You were perfectly fine talking to Hermione, after your aunt crucio-ed her and carved open her arm, Malfoy._

 

He’s not aware of standing, but he is, legs shaking beneath him. He clenches his fists as if his anguish will protect him from the stares. Up on the platform, the teachers’ conversations had come to a close, an indication for the students to quieten for the headmistress’ speech. Now Mcgonagall rises to her feet, one eyebrow raised. 

 

Draco untangles himself from the bench and stumbles between the tables. His footsteps echo loudly in the silence and the doors have never seemed further away. He reaches them and is finally able to be alone, in the entrance hall, empty of whispers. 

 

He collapses against the cold stone wall, sliding down to the floor and hugging his knees. He’s still shaking with a chill that has seeped into his bones. 

 

“Did you know you’re getting wax in your hair?” He looks up, startled by Luna Lovegood’s dreamy voice. Sure enough, a spot of molten wax dribbles down his forehead. He moves out from under an overflowing candle and brings a hand up to his hair, which is sticky and clammy with grease. He staggers upright, pulling clumps of hardening wax from his head. “He doesn’t hate you, you know.”

 

“What?” Asks Draco, startled.

 

“Harry Potter.” She twists one of her radish earrings between two fingers absentmindedly and looks intently into his eyes. “It was really brave of you.” At his lack of comprehension, she elaborates, as if she thinks he’s just a little bit thick, “Lying to the death eaters.”

 

“It didn’t make any difference.” He spits and walks away. 

 

He doesn’t notice that she’s been following him until the landing of the seventh floor. He ignores the footsteps keeping pace with his own and her silhouette at the end of the corridor as he paces in front of Barnabas the Barmy. The door opens once more and it’s refreshing to be able to walk into a massive conservatory-like hall, rather than The Room of Hidden Things where he spent most of his sixth year, where Vince died and where Draco ignorantly tried to protect the Dark Lord’s soul. 

 

Despite the darkness outside, sunlight streams through the massive windows, lighting up the dust drifting in the slight breeze from a cracked pane, high up near the arched ceiling, and letting up the covers of books, which appear to be hanging from invisible threads in the air above. Further down, there’s a balcony, running halfway up both the outside walls. Draco turns to the corner, where a massive curtain cascades from a rail high above. He makes the familiar scrabbling climb up the red fabric and swings onto the ledge. He settles, legs hanging moving into the empty space, and pins one of the window panes open. He reaches over and plucks a novel from where it had been floating just above his head. He unfolds the corner from his last visit and words from almost three years ago dawn like déjà vu. 

 

Lovegood’s voice drifts up from far below, “This place is beautiful.” She’s turning slowly on the spot, face tilted upwards, her fingers reaching to brush the volumes around her. Draco is too far up to read the titles, but he suspects he would be baffled by whatever books the room had chosen for Luna Lovegood anyway.  


He knows how the room works and he’s not surprised that this strange girl managed to predict his request, ‘I need somewhere I can escape,’ and repeat it in order to slip in after him. Sometimes he desperately wishes that the hat had placed him in Ravenclaw. Better to be a weirdo than a creep. 

 

The room responds to Luna’s presence differently than it had on Draco’s first visit. Music rumbles deep from the walls, but this time it’s a female soprano singing something from a muggle song, just loud enough for someone to hear the words if he listens. 

 

Draco Malfoy doesn’t cry at the end of Ishiguro’s _The Remains of the Day,_ but that’s only because he’s empty inside, and he wishes desperately that he’d finished it all those years ago. 

 

His wristwatch tells him it’s past midnight when he peers over the edge. Luna lies on her back in the centre of the stone floor, near the end of a muggle children’s book, rather ambiguously titled ‘My Name is Mina.’

 

He allows _Remains_ to drift upwards, out of sight, and rolls off the ledge. He’s found that he quite likes falling, surrounded by _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_ and _The Chronicles of Narnia._ It’s only when he mutters ‘Aresto Momentum’ a few inches from the ground and flops down a few metres away from her that Draco realises that he’s stopped wishing the minutes of his life away. 

 

She tucks the book into her robe and stands, offering him a hand. He lets her pull him to his feet, their hands twisting together before falling to their respective sides. 

 


	3. Letters From No One

_Six-thirty_

 

He awakes in an empty dormitory, with dust hanging like silk curtains all around him. It shimmers in the dawn light refracting through the lake. The house elves have neglected to clean down here for a while. He doesn’t mind - he deserves it. And it shows they are capable of enough free will to resent the descendants of their former masters. Granger would be pleased. 

 

He rolls onto his front and detaches his eyelashes enough for fragments of a face to appear between the grime on the mirror on the bedside table. He runs a hand through his hair, watching the boy on the other side battling with overlong locks. Momentarily dislocated, he sneers at the other’s vanity, then scowls and tosses the blanket to one side and swings off the bed. 

 

His bare feet leave prints in the dust on the floorboards. He can feel it clinging to the skin of his soles. 

 

His trunk sits in a mess of robes and general debris on Goyle’s old bed. He pulls out his quidditch robes and dresses quickly, grabbing the familiar handle of his nimbus two-thousand-and-one before escaping into the fresher air of the castle. Out in the corridor, he glances around nervously. There’s no one else around this early and in a moment of Gryffindor recklessness, he mounts the broom. 

 

There is all but silence in the dungeons. He stands motionless in the passage, listening to the breathing of the sleeping aristocrats lining the walls. 

 

_Scared, Malfoy._ He can swear Potter’s voice is audible now, and close enough to startle him. He shivers, remembering a disembodied head suspended outside the Shrieking Shack, and curses out loud, triggering a domino trail of snuffles from the sleep of the portraits. Reaching into his pocket, his fingers find the ball, automatically running his thumb over the engraving _I open at the close._ Then he rises into the air, tossing the snitch ahead of him and watching it arc downwards before its wings unfurl and it hovers for a moment in front his nose. He blinks, and it’s gone, now only a golden shimmer in the shadows ahead for a moment. 

 

He remembers to stop thinking, sinking into the cacophony of younger Potter’s voices and surges forwards. He manages the duck under a chandelier, and he recovers, wide eyed, for less than a second before a wall looms from the dark. Choosing correctly which way to pull his broom around the corner more by chance than observation, he catches sight of the snitch ahead and almost crashes into a staircase, narrowly avoids cracking his head on the ceiling, before managing to get the right angle and spiralling up the staircase, following the route through the corridors he now knows instinctively from walking so many times. 

 

He rockets into the entrance hall, wand arm outstretched, his yell of ‘Alohomora!’ echoing through the archways, adrenalin pumping through his veins, before spotting the snitch, clasped in a hand, catching green eyes with his own and colliding with the floor. 

 

The stone is cold against his side and for a moment he thinks he must have just rolled over onto the chilled side of the bed and woken up from a dream. Then his vision clears and he realises that his sheets are white and his arm really hurts. Gingerly, he levers himself onto his back and measures his breathing across the arches of the ceiling, before a face appears in front of it, looking slightly amused. “Go away.” He tells Potter, even though he somehow knows his exhaled breath isn’t going through this one. 

 

“Sorry, but I don’t think I will.” Harry Potter says, straightening up and holding the snitch up to one of the candles, their light dancing in the lenses of his glasses. He wears a somewhat flamboyant muggle suit and his hair is still a mess. One of his hands is buried in a pocket and Draco can’t help but wonder if Potter’s clutching his wand, expecting the other to strike him. Potter looks tired, Draco can’t help but think, but like he’s just met a ghost. He rotates the ball so that the inscription contrasts the reflection of the surface, his eyes narrowing in confusion. “And I’m pretty sure this is mine.” 

 

Draco gulps and closes his eyes, aware that he’d be panicked and relieved if, were he to open them, the man looming above him were gone. He hears the rustling of fabric. When he opens his eyes, one at a time, Potter is crouched over him, sliding Draco’s wand under the hand unconsciously clamped around the fabric of his robes. His eyes are tracing Draco’s face. They meet Draco’s for a moment, which lengthens into actual multiple seconds where he can map constellations in the fibres of Potter’s irises and then reprimand himself internally for being such a bloody sap and then Potter must have seen his self directed sneer because his lips twitch - 

 

Then footsteps echo across the floor, startling them both and Shackelbolt’s voice cuts through the moment with a concerned, “Harry?”. Potter’s eyes flick away. He un-pockets his hand, offering it to Draco. It hangs in the air for a moment and Draco stares at it, reminded of two moments on the Hogwarts Express, before Potter raises an eyebrow and Draco allows himself to be pulled to his feet, his palm pressed to Potter’s for a dizzying second, days too short. 

 

From then on he feels like a naughty first year, ignored as he stands awkwardly under too-bright lights, knuckles white around his battered wand and a broom handle attached to a mess of bent twigs, as the minister invites Potter up to McGonagall's office with too many fatherly embraces for Draco to stomach. 

 

Draco doesn’t look to see if Potter glances back down at him as the auror follows Shackelbolt up the staircase. He waits until their footsteps are drowned out by the grind of a revolving staircase, somewhere high above, and thinks that it may as well have been a dream. 

 

 


	4. I Can't Even Say I Made My Own Mistakes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Title: 'The Remains of the Day', Kazuo Ishiguro

_Nine-twelve_

 

The new potions master, a young man in scarlet robes who is far too enthusiast for anyone’s tastes, barely looks up from his cauldron as Draco ambles in, ten minutes late. “Sit down - ” he starts to say, then actually looks up, his eyes narrowing, his mouth opening a couple of times before he amends, “Ten points from Slytherin,” and gestures to the seat right at the front. Draco walks past the place Hermione’s saved for him and drops his bag under the desk. He misses Severus, desperately. 

 

The imposter, _Professor Maxwell,_ (Muggleborn, Draco notes idly) waits until Draco has laid out all his ingredients for The Draught of Living Death before speaking again, with a defiant expression, as if this were a miniature revolt against a higher power. 

 

This is Teacher Conflict No.2 of this morning. Draco is half expecting to be transfigured into a ferret again. At breakfast, he was sternly reprimanded by the headmistress for ‘hiding away’ in ‘Slytherin’s lair’ rather than ‘embracing house unity’ and joining the eighth year ‘boy’s dormitory community’. He was then given a pained look of sympathy and let off for his ‘reckless behaviour’ as it was clearly due to ‘difficult circumstances.’ 

 

He’s not bitter about this.

 

He shouldn’t be bitter about this. 

 

Why is he bitter about this?

 

_Because, Malfoy, you want to be punished._

 

Yes, thank you for your input, Potter. 

 

Draco is good at potions. Brilliant, in fact. In another, happier life he might have been Severus’ successor. So when he’s left the room having lost twenty house points for ‘carelessness’, he uses the reputation of deeply psychotically disturbed child to kick the stone wall of the corridor several times on the way to defence against the dark arts. 

 

They’ve changed the defence classroom so that the rows of desks are twisted around the edge on stone steps leading down to an elaborately carved lectern. Draco scans the faces of his classmates before taking the empty desk nearest the door. He regrets this when Kingsley enters, ushering in - _Damn it, why? -_ Harry Potter and both their eyes land on him. He can’t help but feel like a little kid being slowly crushed by the gaze of a strict professor. 

 

Somewhere during Potter’s riveting speech on self belief, which, after a few intrusive questions from exited fans, has the entire class listening in total silence, Draco’s mind slips away to an alternate universe where he has replaced Ron Weasley in Harry’s life. The Boy Who Lived shares a bunk with Draco, the two huddled together below Hermione, in the tent where the trio plan their legendary hunt for horcruxes. Harry’s arms hold Draco close, his mouth pressed to his shoulder in the candlelight. Draco knows with absolute certainty that _he_ would never abandon… no, he doesn’t. Because there is no way in Hell Harry would have shaken his hand all those years before. 

 

Draco doodles stick figures with glasses and broomsticks down his roll of parchment until he runs out of ink and then stares numbly at one of the more recognisable characters until his classmate’s enthusiastic applause cracks the air and makes him flinch. When he looks up to meet Potter’s eyes, narrowed slightly into what Draco recognises as the chosen one’s interfering face. As he hurriedly slips the parchment into his bag, he watches Potter approach in his peripheral vision and braces himself. 

 

“You could have done with listening.”

 

Draco stares into the detritus lining his satchel and snorts derisively. 

 

“Come on - I’m not that dull a speaker, am I?”

 

Merlin, he sounds so much like Lupin, so much more grown up and yet - so uncorrupted, so - _sorted out._  Draco looks up, eyes flickering briefly past the green tie and bloody emerald flower on his lapel to meet Potter’s and then away to the smiley face scratched into the desktop, rubbing it with his thumb. “Which part of my ‘self’ would you have me believe in, oh Mr Saviour?” He's forgotten how enjoyable it is to sneer at someone and know they won't think his distain threatening, worthy of wands drawn and directed at his heart.

 

He feels Potter’s gaze on him, then freezes as a hand is lain over his own. It’s slightly damp - _the chosen one, nervous in the face of a few teenagers?_ “The part that didn’t tell Bellatrix it was me at the manor, the part that risked burning to death to save his friends in the room of requirement - ”

 

“ _I couldn’t even fight_ _properly for the bloody fucking cause I chose._ ” Draco realises he is yelling and everyone else has stopped filing out to watch and whisper and _giggle_. He lowers his voice to a hiss. “If cowardice is the only part of me capable of ‘good’ then it’s a _good_ thing I’m always terrified out of my mind.” The effect of his venom is undermined slightly by the soft pressure of Harry’s hand where he cannot face shaking it off, calluses tickling his knuckles. He closes his eyes, hoping it will all just go away, knowing his face is red under the pressure of all their stares.

 

_Eleven-six-thirty-six_

 

 

_Eleven-six-thirty-seven_

 

 

_Eleven-six-thirty-eight_

 

 

_Eleven-six-thirty-nine-I can feel the pulse in his thumb_

 

 

_Eleven-six-forty-gone._

 

When Draco opens his eyes the pads of his fingers are white from the force he’s been pressing them to the desktop. Hermione sits on the steps below him, but otherwise the room is empty. He stands abruptly, his chair scraping loudly on the wood, and she looks up from her book, closes it and silently following him out and into the courtyard. 

 

Somehow they’re lying on the grass, watching a square of blue infinity swirl with cloud. Draco becomes conscious of the silence and reaches back for something to fill it with. “How’s Weasley?” He asks, wondering if he cares. 

 

Hermione looks over at him, her expression _understanding_ for some reason. “Oh. They broke up.”

 

He narrows his eyes in confusion, then realises that they are at cross-purposes. “No, I meant - ” he winces at the unfamiliar title, “Ronald.”

 

Hermione relaxes back into the grass, exhaling. “Ronald is…” She trails off. “Why all the pleasantries?”

 

He shrugs, but she’s not looking at him.

 

She bites her lip. “He’s gay.”

 

Draco cranes his neck to look at her. “Weasley?” He thinks about this for a second. There was that thing with Krum… “Seriously?”

 

“No, you idiot. Harry.”

 

“Why are you telling me this?” he asks, breath catching in his throat. 

 

Hermione smiles. It’s slightly pained. “Because he talks about you _a lot._ And, to be honest, it’s getting quite annoying.”

 

Draco doesn’t know what to make of that. The very thought of it is wrong, almost perverted - the saviour, interested in a death eater _. What would the papers say?_

 

He feels more filthy and broken than ever for even considering this possibility and stands, stumping slightly, suddenly unable to stand being out in plain view. In his spinning head, Potter is saying something, but Draco’s blocking it out, drowning the soft words in the hiss of the Dark Lord, Bellatrix’s cackling, someone screaming - that muggle studies professor, he thinks, Charity Burbage, crying out to Severus as their lord and master taunted her - or Hermione, spread out on the floorboards as Draco’s aunt carved _that word_ into her arm - his own voice, snarling it - _mudblood_ \- over and over, so that he can’t concentrate on the clock in his head or the ground below his feet or the air around him or the ground hard against his nose or the grass in his face or the voices above him or the 

 

 


	5. Intermission

There comes a time, after you’ve been stood in a teacher’s office to be reprimanded for the fourth or fifth time and they are attempting to appeal to your sense of common decency in your dealings with fellow students, that you start to actively try to cause needless hurt - that you believe that you are a bad person. 

Years later, you’ll look back nostalgically at a time when you believed your mother when she said that being kind made you a bigger person, and grieve for the person you could have been. But, now, right now, you are free, following in the footsteps of the legendary dark lords (or the deep holes dug in the path tread by your father, in their shadows) to cleanse the earth from the scum around you. Well, at least in the moments where your not scared out of your skull or attempting to knock the self hatred out of it with the sharp application of head to wall. 

Draco’s first thought is of one of those days, slumped down on his knees, pressed against cold stone as he comes too with the familiar thumping in his temples, almost feeling the chill against his cheek even as the image is replaced by the crisp sheets of a hospital bed. 

Someone’s piled some books on the table beside him. He smiles painfully as he reads the titles, with no doubt as to who has put them there. It’s not exactly light reading. 

The curtains are pulled around his bed, hiding the criminal from view. His eyes glaze over as he stares at the double image of the folded white fabric, in different shades of grey. 

A shadow moves over them and someone whispers, “Draco,” and Draco realises that, despite the brightness, it must be night. 

“Hermione?”

A hand fumbles with the hangings, then emerges, still twisting with the air for a moment, and then waving at him. “Luna.”

“Hey, Luna. Why is it light?”

“Is it?” Her bare feet, slightly green with grass stains around her nails, appear under the curtain. “I suspect wrackspurts are behind it.”

“Yes,” agrees Draco, for lack of things to say. 

“I brought you something.” Her hand disappears and the shadow shifts as Luna appears to be emptying her pockets. She makes a satisfied noise and offers him something on her palm. Surprised, he reaches out to take a small metal broach.

“It’s sad, you know?” She says, as he runs his thumb over the inscription, and he looks up. “How you always look like you’re sleeping.” He watches her fingers fiddle with a loose thread before it vanishes once more and the shadow follows it from the room with a quiet call of “Goodnight, Draco Malfoy.”

He pins the broach declaring himself a ‘friend of Luna Lovegood” to pyjamas he doesn’t remember putting on.


	6. The Forbidden Forest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', T.S Eliot: http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam312/prufrock.html

Draco watches a ceiling do nothing for an entire day. At first, it quakes slightly as he is wracked with nausea, but it’s the only thing that gets him through the cold sweat, focusing on the whitewashed plaster. After this has passed, there is only the ticking of his internal clock to interrupt the poetry his brain and then Draco is still on leave from classes, but Pomfrey has discharged him from the hospital wing. Normally, he’d lurk in the dungeons or the Room of Requirement, but the weather is so un-Scottish that Draco watches the sky swirl above him for an entire day. He’s so engrossed in the disintegrating and reforming cloud formations traced across a blue which would make Yves Klein jump from the top of the Eiffel Tower, that he doesn’t immediately notice Luna’s presence beside him on the grass. 

 

Perhaps she’s concerned that Draco Malfoy is lying immobile on the ground once again, or maybe she just can’t bare to be out-weirded, but when Draco sniffs, bemused, and turns his head, she’s wafting the fumes of a lime green candle over his chest. They smell quite pleasant, but Luna’s in danger of setting her hair on fire, so Draco sits up and crosses his legs so that she doesn’t have to lean over hims to - do whatever it is she is doing. 

 

“Nargles?” Draco whispers, as if trying not to disturb a wasp hovering near his face. 

 

Luna shakes her head as if this were a ridiculous suggestion and tells him, quite seriously, that his auror needs patching. Draco nods as if this is a rational statement and lets Luna do her thing as he watches a large group of first years splash each other at the edge of the lake and roll down the slope from the willows overhanging the water. He tries to remember being that un-selfconscious in front of his classmates and then notices what seems so odd about the children playing down by the loch - a girl in yellow trimmed robes is racing a Ravenclaw through the shallows, a pale Slytherin kid, soaking wet and giggling uncontrollably, splashes two boys with red and gold ties knotted around their heads - Mcgonagall’s not so secret project to promote ‘inter house unity’ is proving successful. Watching them feels surprisingly bittersweet. Surprising, not only that this melancholy has punctured his barricade of numbness (he thinks of it like a callous, where the damage of the world has worn him so thin that the build up of new skin is rock hard - it’s protection, but it feels unnatural to his touch), but that he regrets not mingling with the other houses in those early years. The prospect still feels alien, despite how familiar the sight of Luna’s blue tie, twisted around her collar like a cravat, and the pride he has begun to feel whenever Hermione is awarded a point for Gryffindor, has become. 

 

And now ever smile which stretches across his features like the skin tautening across the rim of a hollow drum is for either one of them, despite the fact they can read the lie as if someone’s scribbled it between the lines of a book. 

 

Smoke swirls about him and Luna and he realises that she has blown out the candle. Watching it spiral up through the breeze, he thinks of the Dark Mark, branded across the sky like a fatal airplane trail above Dumbledores body and all he can see in this smoke, here and now, is skulls. When he pulls out his wand, the word on his lips is _morsmordre_ but he doesn’t speak it, instead attempts to rework the intention behind that ancient spell with happier images. 

 

A few of the younger students stop to watch as the swirls of smoke become dancing figures, like trees swaying free from their roots. “Narnia…” Luna breaths, watching the ashen dryads grow and twirl out into the Forbidden Forest, where they dissipate amongst the real trees. 

 

It seems to be Luna’s enthusiasm, more than the appeal of the spell, which has a few of the first years gathered around them to learn it. Someone has brought strawberries, probably pilfered from the kitchens or greenhouses, and they sit round in a circle eating them with their free hand, wands held aloft, whilst, in the centre, a conjured fire hovers above the grass to feed the chaos of animals and figures colliding and interlocking overhead like patronuses in the afterlife. 

 

It doesn’t surprise him when only Luna notices him slip away and head back to the castle. 

 

“Why couldn’t you just sit with them?” Hermione asks, later, when they’re both curled up on the Gryffindor common room and Draco is pretending to be someone else and that those staring, glaring or casually hating him are the strange ones in the room. 

 

Draco isn’t sure how to reply. He’s used to analysing himself, especially since the war, but with someone else involved, everything he puts into words seems fake or contrived. After long enough that he thinks Hermione is going to say something else, move the conversation somewhere more comfortable for him, long enough for his inner Harry to berate him for being a coward, he asks, “Have you read any Eliot?” 

 

Hermione closes her mouth, looking confused. “Which one?”

 

Draco feels an unfamiliar shame at his ignorance of muggle literature - having been unaware of multiple Eliots. “T. S.”

 

“Just _Pufrock, Quartets, Wasteland_ and a few essays…”

 

Draco looks away from her searching eyes, around at the perfectly ordinary, perfectly innocent Gryffindors. “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes…” he quotes, “…an easy tool…” sneering slightly.

 

Hermione looks all too understanding in the of the corner of his eye as she counters, quietly, “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Then, almost a whisper, “Till human voices wake us…”

 

Draco finds his compulsion to finish the line almost amusing and he silently mouths the words as Potter hisses to _shut up, you pretentious child_ and her turns back to meet Hermione’s gaze head on and find that, in fact, she’s trailed off, not due to the profound description of his mental state, but because of something happening behind him. Now he notices that it’s not just her - the noisiest of the houses has quietened to the level of one of Severus’ potions classes. 

 

When he turns, the real Harry Potter is offering him a piece of parchment, and he is embarrassingly conscious of his orange socks. 


	7. The Yellow Smoke

Harry Potter has the handwriting of a child, in that it looks like he’s taken an absurd amount of concentration to spell out the words ‘Will you come to Hogshead with me this Saturday?’ and that he prefers the written form over verbal communication - it reminds Draco of the trauma before the Yule Ball in fourth year. 

 

As Draco takes the quill from Harry’s cool fingers, his hands shaking, he realises that this strange form of address is probably more for his benefit than Harry’s. Feeling Harry’s anxious eyes on him, he stares at the words for so long that the letters cease to string together properly. Finally, he decides that even if the meaning he’s taken from these words is deluded and ridiculous, it is a yes/no question, so answering in the affirmative will not be too humiliating. He then attempts to steady himself so that his answer doesn’t look like it was written by a geriatric, and scratches a Y E and S into the parchment. 

 

He hears Harry exhale and looks up to meet his eyes. For the first time, the child Potter dissipates among the gathering crowd, leaving the relic, Harry, here, looking at Draco full of hope and joy and regret and a dreadful sadness, and then leaning down to press his lips to Draco’s forehead andpulling away to flop on the other side of Hermione, draping his legs over the book on her lap and underneath her look of irritation is something like pride. 

 

Draco looks at Harry’s feet against his thigh and imagines kneeling to wash them, running a cloth in the trench between the toes and the sole and into the soft hollows around the ankle, Harry’s hands reaching down to burry themselves in Draco’s hair. Submerged in the fantasy, he realises the biblical symbolism and modifies their positions - Harry kneeling, Christlike, in benediction, tracing his fingers over his instep in a circle that is becoming a - 

 

“I think Maxwell’s up to something,” Harry says.

 

Draco blinks away the image of Tom Riddle drawing the Dark Mark onto his foot. Hermione sighs and puts her book down. 

 

“No one is up to anything, Harry. There is nothing to be up to anymore. You killed…” Harry winces and she trails off. 

 

In the increasingly painful silence, Draco attempts to focus on the real world, now. 

 

“It does leave a vacancy, though,” he volunteers. 

 

“Planning anything, Malfoy?” Harry asks mildly. Draco clamps his teeth and goes cold inside, repeating NUMB. NUMB. NUMB. until it’s said in Harry’s voice. NUMB. NUMB - I DIDN’T MEAN - Draco realises that the voice has escaped his head and now speaks from Harry’s mouth, “I’m sorry, Malfoy - _Draco_.”

 

Draco plasters on a smile, as fake as a bright yellow smiley face and flicks Harry’s big toe. The saviour winces and kicks back and Hermione, always diplomatic, thumps them both. 

 

“So what makes you think Clerk Maxwell is the next Dark Lord?” Draco asks, rubbing his arm. 

 

“Can we not have one year free of near death experiences?” Hermione asks the ceiling. 

 

“Flitwick was saying that he’s volunteering to an excessive number of extracurricular - stuff it, you’re right. Let someone else deal with a potential threat to the entirety of civilisation. I’ve done my fair share.”

 

“More than - some of us could have done with a bit of carefree heroing to brighten up our childhoods. Selfish, if you ask me.” Draco reaches down to tickle Harry’s feet before it dawns on him that he’s weirdly obsessed and then it’s too late to abort the gesture unnoticed. 

 

Harry laughs hysterically, which is the most sickeningly adorable and heart melting sound which has ever trespassed through Draco’s ears, and squirms away from his fingers. Eventually, Hermione extracts herself to read _A Brief History of Time_ in the armchair opposite. Draco finds himself with unhindered access to The Saviour and stiffens up, leaving Harry in a tangle of limbs and clasping his knees to his chest instead, because this all feels immoral suddenly, almost pollutant. 

 

Then Harry swivels around to rest his back against Draco’s legs and complains that he’s ‘too bloody bony’ but stays there anyway as Draco slowly breaks into pieces under his skin, until he’s sure that shards of his collapsed self must be poking into Harry’s shoulder blades, too polite to say - please go and shatter over someone else. And part of him is warm, somewhere deep inside where hands reach out like primitive man to worship the fire, reach out to the burning skin where Harry’s shirt is pressed against his trouser leg, infinitely close but never physically touching. And part of him is cold, higher up where his head is shattering like an egg fallen and crushed into a mess of chicken excrement on the ground. 

 


	8. The Servant of Lord Voldemort

Draco exchanges intimidating glares with his reflection for several minutes, ignoring his mirror’s catty comments, before, cowed, he untangles himself from his best dress robes and settles for his favourite black muggle shirt and grey jeans, then covering up the ensemble with a jumper, blazer, jacket and his Slytherin scarf because it’s sleeting outside and if he has enough sleeves covering his forearms then there is less likelihood of one rolling up to reveal the skin beneath. 

 

Then he steps out the front doors with a bunch of overexcited thirteen year olds into blinding sunlight and glances around nervously before shedding the scarf and jacket and banishing them to his room. When he turns back, Harry Potter is standing at the bottom of the steps, Hermione muttering into his ear while he smiles determinately ahead. He’s in his shirtsleeves, despite the slushy grounds, and the green of his woollen tank top picks out the luminous pigment which rims his pupils like sunlit leaves… 

 

He catches Draco’s eye and for an awful moment, Draco thinks he sees the smile flicker. But then there are teeth, and Draco is _in love_ \- but not really because that would be weird. 

 

When he reaches bottom of the, suddenly dizzyingly high, steps, Harry Potter offers his arm and Draco snorts derisively. And takes it anyway.

 

“Three Broomsticks?”

 

“Your imagination astounds me.”

 

Potter elbows him. “Snarky.” He’s teasing. Draco’s stomach starts a routine of complex gymnastics. The word, and the voice, echoes round his suddenly deserted brain as Potter waves goodbye to Hermione and loads of other things, apparently, as the exchange goes on for a long time and is entirely incomprehensible. 

 

As Harry moves them down the road to Hogsmead, Draco has images of a scrawny child in leg braces, supported by a healthier friend as his legs swing woodenly and clop down on the paving stones. He feels as ungainly, beside the chosen one. Held up to his detriment. 

 

Some swirls of dirty blond hair flick into Draco’s vision, and then Luna’s skipping along beside them. “Alright Harry, Draco? You look a little grey.”

 

Harry peers at him and Draco shrinks. “He does, doesn’t he?”

 

“My father’s written an article of the effect of nargles on melanin production in the skin.”

 

“Are they getting in through the gaps in his auror, do you think? Maybe you could introduce Draco as a test subject…” Harry trails off, his smirk fading, and there’s a painful silence as they all remember the events at Malfoy Manor.

 

“Maybe not such a good idea - I’m afraid it is a permanent affliction of my complexion,” Draco half croaks. 

 

“You always were a peaky child.”

 

“Charming.”

 

They pass Zonko’s joke shop, and Draco sees Harry wince and follows his gaze to a red haired boy laughing with the shopkeeper on his way out into the bustling street. Suddenly, Draco feels sick. Beside him, Harry flinches at regular intervals - at a man with a gentle face, heavily scarred, wheeling a pram past them, or a pink haired teen tripping over a stack of cauldrons in front of one of the apothecaries, at a large billboard depicting a single, bright blue eye, and the menagerie’s window display of snoozing snowy owls. It’s a relief to reach Honeydukes and pretend that they aren’t way too old to find all the different sweets awe inspiring, despite the face Draco thinks he might throw up over Harry’s well loved wooden top. And then, for some bizarre reason, they round a stack of shelves to be confronted with a display of muggle sweets, ‘Sherbet Lemons, 7 sickles a scoop!’, and they exchange tortured expressions, like soldiers from opposite trenches over bloodstained barbed wire, then bolt. 


	9. In peices

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is very short. I apologise - it just happened.

It is strange that neither of them have ever been to the south of Hogsmeade before now, apart from on the train, of course. The houses fall away into trees and the cobble stones disintegrate into a dirt path. The winter’s first few flakes of snow float down onto their cloaks and cling to the fabric like lint. A couple settle on Harry’s hair in a contrast which has Draco thinking of the Muggle fairytale Snow White and in that moment, his companion is beautiful and etherial, all ebony blacks against soft whites, nose and cheeks red in the cold - like a Japanese brush figure winding between the bare birch trees. Draco falls behind, walking with feet carefully placed in Harry’s footprints as if tracking him through the wilderness. 

 

The snow gets suddenly heavier and Harry turns back towards him, now a small isolated shape still walking backwards in the featureless white landscape, and tips his head up towards the sky, mouth open to capture the swirling flakes. When he looks back down at Draco, his mouth still half open, the snow is hanging on the hood of his cloak and the tip of his nose and clouds the lenses of his glasses and Draco wants to laugh or cry and mostly to photograph this moment and arrange a shrine with it as centrepiece. 

 

Then Harry trips over his own feet and falls backwards with a soft flumping sound and Draco sniggers. Looking down at Harry with a sense of deja vu, his smile doesn’t fade until it’s returned. 

 

“I think I’m in love with you, Draco Malfoy.”

 

When Draco laughs, it’s as loud and cruel as ice cracking between soft snow-covered banks. 


	10. Erised

Draco runs.

 

It’s ridiculous, he thinks, as he flounders through snow drifts and stumbles to his knees more than once so that his cotton trousers are sodden, clinging to his skin and sapping the heat from his flesh. It’s ridiculous that he doesn’t just apparate somewhere far away from Harry’s pleading shouts. Somewhere he can suffer for his sins without pounding into his condensed breath and clenching his burning fists to try and crush out the chill.

 

So he does. 

 

At exactly four forty eight in the afternoon, Kings Cross station glistens with bizarre stationary sparkly things in gold, silver, red and green. Draco stumbles through the crowds, receiving confused looks at the snow dripping from the wool of his jumper, and then stands and stares, because there is a man dressed in red and white and he thought the immortal Saint Nicholas was no more than a myth the muggles told to their young. He sits there in his plastic sleigh, surprisingly underwhelming for such an exalted deity, his arm around a small boy. 

 

A long queue of families are waiting to speak with the old man and Draco thinks this father of Christmas must have some great wisdom to impart if so many people are willing to make the pilgrimage to see him. Maybe he hands out the objects which will allow for these people to endure their destinies, like in _The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe._ Draco thinks of Susan’s horn to be blown in a time of need and feels a pang of what he imagines they mean by _verklempt._ In his head, the instrument’s single mellow note resembles the whistle of the Hogwarts Express leaving platform nine and three-quarters. 

 

He finds himself amongst the line of people awaiting an audience with Saint Nicholas and clasps his arms over his chest, conscious of the ridiculously dressed people pressing up around him and the massive clock looming over his head burning numbers into his retinas. He squeezes his eye’s shut, but they are still there, digital, red and burning over the half formed images of a figure lying dark against the white glow of snow. 

 

_Four fifty eight._

 

_Four fifty nine._

 

_Four fifty -_

 

Someone small tugs on his sleeve and he startles back, because that particular sleeve conceals his master’s ugly brand. Looking down he meets large silver grey eyes. They belong to a tiny child with frizzy blond hair and an impertinent expression. 

 

“Santa’s not for grown ups,” She tells him, pouting slightly as her father attempts to pull her away. “He only gives presents to the _children_ on his nice list. Children, specif - “ She sneezes mid word, “Speci-fi-cally.” 

 

“Well,” replies Draco, sneering slightly down at the miniature Narcissa, “I’m sure that even if I were two feet tall, I wouldn’t be on anyone’s nice list. I think I’ll try my luck, though.” He couches down to the muggle’s eye level, “I don’t want a present for me, exactly. I’m hoping for something for someone very special. To make up for something very bad I did to them.”

 

The child gasps, whispering, “What did you do?” with sufficient melodrama to impress Draco. 

 

“I broke his heart,” he whispers back. 

 

She presses a hand to her chest, as if she could feel some physical damage within herself. 

 

“And I don’t really think I’m a grown up, quite yet.” He tells her, standing. 

 

Her eyes narrow. “But you have grey hair.”

 

He chokes slightly on his laughter. “So do you, little muggle, so do you. Tell me, are you related to any Malfoys, do you know?”

 

“What’s a muggle?” she asks whilst, behind her, the father looks surprised, placing a hand on the child’s head.

 

“That’s my wife’s maiden name. How did you know?”

 

Draco smirks, “Draco Malfoy,” he introduces himself, offering a hand. “I believe I am a distant relation.” 

 

The man shakes Draco’s hand firmly, smiling with friendliness and ignorance, then turns to call out to a woman further back in the queue, “Agnes! Come meet Draco. You could be related!” 

 

When he turns back to explain to this bizarre young man who seems to still believe in Father Christmas to explain about his orphan wife’s mission to find her unknown family, Draco Malfoy has vanished and his daughter stands and _stares at thin air,_ because “Daddy, he’s gone. He just vanished, Daddy, like magic.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is the end. There will be a sequel, which will feature the family in this chapter as well as some Drarry... if I get round to it.


End file.
